Content Creation Performance

Adobe Photoshop CS4

To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.

The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.

Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.

Our Photoshop workload still runs better on Intel hardware, but the gap in performance between the 5800K and 3220 is smaller than it was between the FX-8150 and 2500K last year. While Bulldozer was pretty much unrecommendable, Trinity approaches tradeoff territory.

3dsmax 9 & POV-ray

Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.

Once again in a heavily threaded FP benchmark, the A10 and Core i3 perform very similarly. POV-Ray is another example of this below:

File Compression/Decompression Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Our multithreaded Par2 recovery test shows AMD with a small advantage over the Core i3 3220, although it obviously can't touch any of the more expensive quad-core parts.

Excel Math Performance

Not all heavily threaded FP applications are easy wins for AMD. In our Monte Carlo simulation benchmark the 3220 manages a decent lead over the A10-5800K.

Our old Sorenson Squeeze test is one area where we see a slight regression compared to Llano. Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't super common but it does happen from time to time given the dramatic architecture difference between Llano and Trinity.

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177 Comments

It looks to me that we are seeing a race to the bottom, and Intel isn't playing. After seeing the results, if I have to start with entry level computer (what ever that means today) the best course would be Intel, i3 with a z77 chip set and a modest card.

I have to update one of two computers. The older one will be replaced by this one running the Athlon IIx4 630, stock (It didn't OC worth a damn). It runs CS6 very well. So for my seat, I'll build a new box. I've been waiting to see what to follow. I have two cards available Ati 5670 and Ati 7750. So I can with no additional cost, run the 7750. That makes Intel the only game, because even if I have to lo ball the price, the i3 will equal or surpass the Trinity, using the card. I can upgrade any time all the way to i7 K series.

Given the price of the card if you must include it, you are still positioned well to upgrade the computer with a simple exchange of the processor. Not so for several years with AMD, (best guess here).

Waiting was ok, even though my gut was to go Intel. What I learned is to not be afraid to include the lowly i3. Reply

"Although likely not the target market for someone buying a Trinity APU, we looked at performance of AMD's latest APU when paired with a high-end discrete GPU. The end result is a total loss for Trinity."

brand new way to piss on AMD's cookies, by Anand The Shameless...Reply

I just got a Toshiba S875D-S7350 laptop with AMD A10-4600M processor and tried somesimple benchmarks -- the result was pretty disappointing. Running 4 identical processes(Ubuntu 12.04) causes the completion time of each process to degrade substantially.

I do some work with generating graphs and analysing them, so basic integer performanceis the most important thing for me.

hello guys, i have a big question, i own a8-5600k, along with 8gb ddr3 1600mhz, my question is why does my computer lag, but really really lag in games on facebook like farm heroes saga???i cannot explain it to myself, why i can run even crysis 2 on medium-high, but cannot run normally a stupid flash player game!!!please help.happy hollidays!Reply